Talk about beating up a story...

Jayson Blair, the subject of a five-page
Times spread exposing his systematic
plagiarism

He was affable, energetic and a New York Times
rising star. But Jayson Blair's deceit was a scoop clamouring to be exposed. By Oliver Burkeman

The first time Macarena Hernandez crossed paths with Jayson Blair it was 1998 and they were summer interns at The New York Times. The affable, boundlessly energetic, 21-year-old Blair shone: a year later, he was back at the Times and rising fast.

Hernandez went to work on a small Texan daily, the San Antonio Express-News.

She was sent last month to interview a local woman whose soldier son was missing in Iraq. She wrote a tender piece, full of minutely observed details about the woman, Juanita Anguiano: the decor of her living room, her hand gestures, her way of speaking.

So, when most of the same details appeared under Blair's name the following week, Hernandez's editor was outraged and wrote to the Times. Blair, now 27, was asked to provide travel expenses to prove he had travelled to Texas, and could not do so. He resigned last week.

Which was how, this week, The New York Times came to publish an extraordinary and humiliating set of stories: five broadsheet pages, including the front page, totalling nearly 14,000 words and headlined "Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Destruction".");document.write("

advertisement

");
}
}
// -->

The result of an investigation by five Times reporters and two researchers, the expose showed that Blair had been making things up for years: fabricating sensational scoops on the Washington sniper case, inventing quotes from people he had never spoken to, borrowing other reporters' work with abandon and frequently claiming to be in towns and cities across America when, according to phone records and travel expenses, he was usually at home in Brooklyn.

"His tools of deceit were a cell phone and a laptop computer," the paper noted, explaining how Blair had elaborately contrived to update his editors on the progress of stories he was supposedly covering. He studied photographs on the paper's internal computer network, the story said, and used them to describe the places where he was not.

It is the biggest journalistic scandal since The Washington Post returned a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 when it was discovered reporter Janet Cook had invented an eight-year-old heroin addict.

Because Blair is black, the controversy has also rejuvenated a debate on affirmative action.

The executive editor of the Times, Howell Raines, told a meeting of staff this week that he believed in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities. "Does that mean I personally favoured Jayson? Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many ... When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes."

But no newspaper, as Raines has been quick to point out, could be designed to catch the most determined fraudster intent on abusing the trust that is the basis of journalism.

Blair and The New York Times seemed like a perfect fit. At The Boston Globe, where he had held an internship before, the University of Maryland student had been "controversial", according to David Shribman, then the paper's Washington bureau chief. "I was down on him," Shribman told the Globe. "He was kind of sneaky and snoopy with other reporters, in personal gossip."

But at the Times, he impressed the upper echelons so much they asked him back in June 1999, on the assumption - wrong, as it turned out - that he had graduated from his university. He was fearsomely productive but also a study in disorganisation, letting voicemails pile up and having to be warned about his personal appearance.

He drank. "I told him that he needed to find a different way to nourish himself than by drinking scotch, smoking cigarettes and buying Cheez Doodles from the vending machine," Charles Strum, an editor on the Metro desk, told the Times.

The number of corrections his stories were generating was an issue as early as 2000, but it was after the September 11 terrorist attacks that it began to draw the attention of senior editors. "He made mistakes and was unavailable for long stretches," the investigators wrote.

By April 2002, Jonathan Landman, the paper's Metro editor, was prompted to send an email, apparently to senior Times employees. "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the paper," it read. "Right now."

Blair went on leave and came back, according to reports, on the understanding that he would be writing smaller, closely monitored assignments.

Then, on October 2, a 55-year-old man named James Martin was killed in suburban Maryland, the first victim of the so-called Washington snipers. Eight Times reporters were dispatched. Blair was among them.

As with many of the often sensational sniper stories that Blair filed with a Washington dateline, mobile phone records showed he was actually in New York. On at least one instance, audaciously, he even seems to have been filing the story from his desk at the Times.

After the rescue of the prisoner of war Jessica Lynch (pictured left), Blair was sent - or so his editors believed - to the family's home in Palestine, West Virginia, a dateline he used on a sequence of reports recreating their rustic surroundings in detail. But the details that were true had been reported by others, while many, including the view of "tobacco fields and cattle pastures" from the Lynch home, appear to have been invented.

"What he did is on an epic scale," said Alex Jones, a former Times journalist, author of a monumental history of the paper and now a professor at Harvard University. "But the thing that shocked me was the reaction of people when they read about (themselves) in The New York Times and knew it to be false. Their reaction seemed to be a kind of shrug - 'What do you expect?"' Not one person whom Blair claimed falsely to have interviewed contacted the paper to point it out.

The affirmative-action question is harder to resolve. Numerous prominent commentators, including veteran media-watcher Kurt Andersen and The Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, argue that Blair's race must have played a role in his rapid promotion.

But it is hardly the case, as Kurtz seemed to suggest, that a white reporter with an error rate as high as Blair's - he had had 50 stories corrected since he joined the paper - would have aroused suspicions sooner. A deft bit of database searching by The Weekly Standard magazine showed that Blair's 50 corrections worked out at 6.9per cent of his stories - a rather better rate than the paper's veteran commentator R.W. Apple (14.1per cent) or Washington bureau reporter Adam Clymer (9per cent).

This week, Raines outlined a series of steps that he said the paper would take to try to protect against a repetition, including changes to the paper's system for managing accounts and keeping track of reporters' locations.

Blair has retreated from public view: a Newsweek report described him as being in a "hospital setting".

In a brief interview, he read from a letter he said he had sent to his former bosses. "I have been struggling with recurring personal issues. I am now seeking appropriate counselling ... and I regret what I have done."

Says Jack Shafer, editor-at-large of Slate magazine: "Breaking news is hard and tedious and time-consuming work. So rather than put some deep psychological gloss on it that makes him the victim, rather than readers, who are the real victims, I much prefer to say maybe he just couldn't do it." ,p>